r/musicproduction

I'm very tech savy, but more creative with CAD stuff. My kid, deciding to fall farthest from the tree, is very talented in music creation. He's been using My Singing Monsters Composer to compose some really nice pieces. He's just about ready for the next jump. I was thinking of something like FruityLoops, but I get lost with it. I bought a Midi Akai keyboard, but keep getting lost in the process.

I need a good recommendation rather than continuing to stumble blindly into a massive corn field. I really want to feed this kid's desire to play, but am a little lost.

EDIT: He has a full sized keyboard in his room with light-up keys and an upright piano in the living room (wife plays). Over the years, he's collected a variety of percussion instruments.

The Autism makes teaching him really difficult to impossible (non-verbal). He's been learning it on his own. It started with smashing, then little by little he started playing the songs from the shows he liked. Then he started his own stuff. When the Monster's game came around, he started making arrangements in there (placing monsters on a staff). Impressive game.

I know FruityLoops is basically the same thing, you turn on segments you want an instrument to play. I'm trying to build on the direction he is going. Stepping stone my way into the DAW stuff. I want an intermediary between Singing Monsters and FruityLoops.

Autism really confounds how you teach him.

Thanks for all the responses BTW!

I am currently with Distrokid and they are rubbish tbh. They don't allow more than one primary artist (unless someone can tell me otherwise and how to do it) and I collaborate a bunch, their customer service is lowsy and there are just a lot of issues.

Would you say it's better to go for a free distributor like routenote? sure I lose out on some royalties but at least my music will stay up forever if and when I die as there's no subscription to keep paying. Is there anyway around this for paid subscription ones? like what do other artists do to maintain their music stays up after they die? (without paying the extra legacy fees for them to stay up)

Tbh also the royalty payouts are small at this stage and if I ever made it big I assume the record label would keep my stuff up forever after I pass as they have done for other artists.

I don't want to use a service that charges per song. Any recommendations would be a huge help!

We all know that music will change slightly depending on what environment you are listening to it in. One of my favorite things to do is listen to the music I know best with production headphones. I recommend doing this for a few reasons.

-The main one being; to get a sense of how the producer heard the final product and decided it was finished. It also allows you to hear intricacies in the music that would otherwise be diminished with consumer headphones.

-This is good because it shows you that even professionally recorded sound has what could be considered “flaws”.

-You, the listener, are left to decide whether those are intentional noises, something that the producer decided to work around, something that they tried their best to weed out of the mix, or just a plain old blemish on the record.

-Now you can compare how the same song sounds in different environments to get an understanding of what changes were made to the mix, and where, to make it sound how it does in any given environment (car, headphones, speaker, etc).

TL;DR- In short, it allows you to examine what is accepted as the standard of professional sound in a way that will help you to understand your own mixes better. That is all.